Other Android Developers?

[Cory Trese]

I am asking this question:

"Which other Android developers have you spoken with and how have they worked to support your feature and bug requests?"

As we work to grow beyond 1000 forum members and 100K active players we're looking around the Android ecosystem for inspiration developers who are providing world class service to a larger footprint of users.

I e-mailed a few developers of other top games some simple relevant questions (after playing for an hour so to figure out what to ask) but I have not heard back from anyone (strange because I really doubt they know me by name.)

So I was talking about this issue and someone pointed out "dude, just ask your players. Who are they working with who is doing a BETTER job than you are? Someone is and I bet they know who it is."

So -- help me help you. Who should we be looking at -- examples of great customer service and game support.

I promise I won't bother / pester any developers you cite on this board. I just want to watch and learn from them.

[Fenikso]

The answer is simple and sad. None. I have written about two bug reports and some of ideas / feature requests. I did not get ANY response. The bugs are still there even after a few new version releases.

[Cory Trese]

Fenikso -- I am certain this thread will get us a list of the good ones going =)

And then we can go play / buy their games. I love good customer service.

[mordechai]

Aug 16, 2011 2:47:39 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

"dude, just ask your players. Who are they working with who is doing a BETTER job than you are? Someone is and I bet they know who it is."

Actually, there can only be one "best," and I think you're in the running.

Having worked as a Customer Service Rep. in the past, I can tell you that most companies see it as an expense. The only time you see a level of responsiveness even close to what you provide is when you're dealing more with passion than profession. I've seen this occasionally in the Open Source world (and then, primarily by communities, not individuals) and only very rarely otherwise.

Perhaps this isn't quite the answer you were looking for, but I hope it nevertheless helps.

[slayernz]

<rant>
It's funny because in some ways there is a stigma associated with owners who spend large proportions of their days in their own forums - "they are the little companies that aren't geared to scale big because they spend too much time in the minutia to see the big picture".

In reality, there can definitely be a good balance between growing your business successfully AND spending time doing the forum thing. I've been doing product management for the past 10 years, and one of the key things about product management is understanding the customer needs, then developing your products to meet those needs.

Clearly those developers who ignore bug-reports, feature requests, and other such feedback should do so at their peril. Instead of listening to customers, too many developers make the mistake of thinking their idea is the one and only amazing thing to be thought of, and everyone MUST buy it because it's so great. It's not just the little one-man developer shops - but also the massive enterprises with teams of hundreds of developers.
</rant>

Cory - you are consistently an exception to the rule in terms of being so aligned in terms of customer expectation matching development priority. Don't get too disheartened when you don't find many like-minded developers. Just embrace the fact that you are truly customer-centric and your product development really reflects what the market wants. It's a cliche, but it's a Win-Win situation.

[celu]

I exalt your rant slayernz.

Cory, why do you think we are very engaged and willingly volunteering (double positive) to support this board?
Because we're only following what you started and reflecting your attitude about personal support. The level of your great customer service, response and updates are sometime shocking for many of us (true for me), since we, the consumers, are so used to "customer no-service" everywhere.

If anything, THEY should be watching and learning from you.

[Raven]

if I remember correctly, there was a small rogue game on the Android Market that I liked to play, and whose developper was pretty nice : Legends Of Yore.

The developper (his name is something like Kevin Glass) also had a forum, which ran like this one : people posting bugs, ideas and advice.

That was no big company, but I liked the way it worked. And a few days ago, I played it again : it really is much better than before.

But, honestly, I don't think you could inspire yourself from it : it is a bit too similar to your way of doing things.

[koles]

maybe its becouse developers are not always programers. you have this comfort that ST and CK are yours.

in situation where app is 'a product' writen by hired programes, this relations developer <--> ppl using app are completely different

[slayernz]

In situations where you have someone responsible for a product (ie product manager) and and one or more different people who actually do the programming, sure the coders shouldn't necessarily spend time in the forums responding to feedback. In fact, although they should be across the big issues that are affecting customers, they should always defer to what the product manager wants to go into the product.

It's the product manager's responsibility to be actively talking with customers and finding out (a) what is wrong with the product - ie, what can we fix, and (b) what would make the product better - ie, what can we add.

Cory's in the (un)enviable position of wearing both hats - product owner and product coder. Given that this forum is one of the key ways he gets visibility into what the users are thinking about (Pineapples in my case), it's great that Cory's so active here. Again, it's rarer than it really should be. It's nice though that Raven has found someone else that might be close to as responsive as Cory. If there were more responsive developers out there, the world would actually have a lot more usable software

[Cory Trese]

Great post:

godzilab-games.com/2011/08/22/stardunk-on-android-commercial-suicide/

I love what they say about responding to e-mails!

[slayernz]

Heh .. I love their pearl of wisdom:
Other advice, that bit us really hard at the beginning, do backup of the player data on your own servers. There’s no backup of the user data to a PC or a Mac such as iTunes does it for iOS, so players are getting crashes which could just wipe all their data or they might also reset or change of device. To avoid having really unhappy customers, I strongly suggest you implement as early as possible a feature where you save the data of the players on the cloud and you allow the users to download it anytime they want.

ST RPG II?